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Getting out of mailing lists

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. — from Hotel California (The Eagles)

I feel this lyric running through my head when I try to unsubscribe from certain mailing lists. Some will ask me to click a hyperlink at the bottom of an email that they sent me. Fine, no problemo.

In the next page, they’ll ask me to login to my account to unsubscribe. Why? I did click the link from the Inbox of the email address that I used to subscribe. Why can’t they authenticate that and let me leave? ‘Security reasons–if we tell you we’ll have to kill you’, I suppose.

Some others will create accounts when I ask to subscribe to their newsletters. Another account? Don’t I have 50 million already? (More like 5 million but…) The reason they’ll give you for creating another account is to help manage your newsletters or that they need more information from you. We’d like to get to know you, kinda thing.

The former seems to imply that I can’t manage newsletters on my own, the latter that they want to get to know me, but won’t let me get to know their CEO or whoever. Either way, I’m not too happy.

There are eight simple rules for mailing lists, but I list only two of them because I don’t know the others.

1. Make it easy to subscribe (join) to a mailing list.

2. Make it easy to unsubscribe (leave) a mailing list.

That’s all I have to say about that.

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[…] Long ago, I’d posted a snippet from Interesting People mailing list. The creator of IP’s Mailing list, Dave Farber, had published a link to some of his rather famous quotes called Farberisms. Though a long list, has some funny and witty quotes. Check it out. PS: Percy, stay away from this mailing list. […]